i spent the better part of three hours last night trying to put in 3 button holes. i haven't even STARTED on the actual buttons yet... i'm still hung up on the holes!

see, you can't just go cutting holes, willy nilly. oh, no. that would cause your fabric to shred around the edges and eventually just fall apart from use. plus there's no stability and the buttons would fall right back out. so you've got to reinforce the edges THEN cut the holes.

my sewing machine has a special little function to do this for me, and really it does an admirable job. except i still have to manually tell it how long to make the button hole, as it's sewing, where to start and end the holes, where to turn around and start the next row... really it's not the machine. i'm just completely inept.

the other problem i ran into, as if it weren't tough enough to make button holes in the first place, is that i didn't measure, mark, and make my button holes BEFORE i installed the button hole flap, and the sewing foot can't fit into the tight little space after the fact where the holes are supposed to go. so instead of having the buttons on the back flap and the holes on the front, they're going to be backwards, with the buttons facing my belly, instead of the outside world. not really a huge issue, as nobody will see it but me, but it's still going to irk me a little.

note to self: do the fly properly next time. forethought = good.

which brings us to the next issue. i had originally gotten some black buttons to use for the fly. they are plain black buttons. nothing fancy. but when i started measuring out where i thought the button holes would need to go, i found that the hole required was going to barely fit. in fact i wasn't sure if it would fit at all. so i poked around in my sewing kit and found some smaller black buttons which i already had lying around. they had these cute little flowers carved in them, and i figured i'd just go ahead and use those. even though they may not hold as well, certainly they'd have a better chance of fitting, and they'd be cuter besides. but now that the button hole is on the back flap, i've got room for the larger buttons, plus since the buttons are now going to be on the inside where nobody is going to see them, i can go ahead and use the larger buttons. but by the time i realized that, i had already stitched the holes for the smaller buttons. completely off center, and not straight at all, but there they were. deciding to save the cute buttons for a better purpose, i went ahead and pulled all that stitching back out.

by that point it was after 9 pm and i gave up. i did get progress made, i'm one step closer to being done, and i learned a lot so tonight should go more smoothly. unfortunately i was hoping to be at least two or three steps closer. i'm still shooting for a friday unveiling, though.